Obama’s Rebuke to the GOP

by Ed Simon

Ed Simon is a PhD candidate in English at Lehigh University, where research focuses on early modern literature and religion. He has written for several academic and general publications, and can be followed at edsimon.org.

What we saw last
evening with President Obama’s speech during the third night of the
Democratic National Convention was what might mark a turning point in
the presidential election, and what may well be remembered as the
finest speech of the president’s career. What we heard was a
passionate, moving, and muscular defense of a certain type of
positive American exceptionalism. This defense has become all the
more necessary over the past few days as Republican presidential
nominee Donald Trump has indicated a desire to abandon America’s
historical obligations to her allies as they’ve developed in the
post-war world.

But even more than
that, in using the word “demagoguery” so as to reject it,
President Obama identified the central threat that American democracy
now faces. At the penultimate night of the Convention, what the
President offered wasn’t just something to vote against (in the
frightening person of Trump), but rather something to vote for, in
the millennial promise of America itself. His speech was an appeal to
an Americanism that is not reducible to ethnic or religious
affiliation, but one that is rather larger, broader, and more
expansive than how nation-states have traditionally defined
themselves. Of course there is nothing new in this – but it’s a
necessary regenerative promise – a prophetic sermon spoken in the
language of holding the nation to the covenant of its highest ideals.
That this was a speech by the nation’s first black president spoken
on behalf of Hilary Clinton who could possibly be the first female
president speaks to the spirit of exceptionalism on display at the
convention.

Both parties have spoken the language
of American exceptionalism; what’s notable is not that Democrats
are speaking that language now, but that the Republican nominee last
week so conspicuously rejected it. The Democratic Party from
Roosevelt to Kennedy to Obama has always conceptualized the nation as
exceptional despite right-wing libel to the contrary. And the
Republican Party certainly has as well, hence Obama’s emphasis on
his Kansan family member’s patriotic Middle American values, and
his quoting of President Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a
“shining city on a hill” (itself a paraphrase of the
seventeenth-century Puritan divine John Winthrop, who was in turn
quoting the book of Matthew).

In Trump’s
blustering, bloviating, apocalyptic diatribe America was no better
than any other nation, and her ideals were entirely ignored. For
Trump, America is simply a powerful country that despite all evidence
to the contrary is now a weak country, which must reassert itself by
paradoxically making war on her citizens at home, while placating
anti-democratic adversaries abroad. When combined with his potential
connections to Vladimir Putin a more than troubling picture emerges.
But if Americans heard an invocation of a nation gone off the rails,
for whom our national safety can only be ensured by rejection of the
very principles that made us great, President Obama’s doubling-down
on America’s promise held out a glimmer of millennial hope. After
last night it’s increasingly hard to argue that there is somehow no
difference between the candidates.

“American exceptionalism” is
certainly a problematic concept (to put it mildly). Imperialism,
racism, sexism, and any number of other ideological evils have
certainly been threaded into the doctrine; the horrors of Manifest
Destiny could not have been accomplished without a paean to American
exceptionalism. And yet, what should not be discounted, what cannot
be rejected is that appeal to the angels of our better nature, that
higher America beyond the realm of history, that platonic ideal to
which the Declaration of Independence pointed. By defining an
American as one who adheres to a desire for “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness,” and where “all men are created equal” a
powerful radicalism of almost eschatological and redemptive
significance entered the American vocabulary. It is not a mistake
that protestors at Tiananmen Square (whose murder Trump condoned when
it happened) created their own shrine to Lady Liberty. It is not a
coincidence that even the Vietnamese who fought their own war of
independence against colonialism (and us) quoted Thomas Jefferson in
their declaration. It is not an error that “American” can refer
to someone of any race, of any faith, of any sexuality. To quote the
late Christopher Hitchens (no fan of the Clintons), “Of course,
objectively as well as subjectively, the American revolution is now
the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success:
the idea that you could create a multicultural democracy over a vast
expanse of the earth's surface that could possibly be emulated by
other people.” The American Revolution, which historian Gordon Wood
famously celebrated for its unassuming “radicalism,” and the
country founded upon those ideals, despite its hypocrisies, its
excesses, and its failures, remains the truest, last, best hope. That
may not mean that the United States as a country is always those
things, but the quasi-mythical ideal of “America” remains so.

America has often, perhaps more often
than not, failed to live up to those promises. And yet it is the
language itself that remains so potent, it is not a mistake that
every single successful movement for human rights, from civil rights
to the LGBT movement to women’s rights, has utilized that same
language. This language has been the property of both major political
parties, despite their ideological differences and arguments over
interpretation. What is so chilling is that the Republican Party,
once the party of Lincoln and increasingly the party of Lincoln
Rockwell, has rejected that utopian language of American
exceptionalism in favor of something smaller, and uglier, and more
common. It’s a prosaic denunciation of the dream that defined the
nation, in favor of a crude and frightened ethnocentrism structured
on a cult of personality, a type of system for which there is no
shortage in the world. But, in his speech on Wednesday, the president
reminded and called Americans whether liberal or conservative,
Democratic or Republican, left or right, back to one self-evident
truth: “The American Dream is something that no wall can contain.”